The first exhibition featured a room filled with real grass that had to be watered. By the second show, 300 to 400 people were coming to the vernissage. What she did not know at the time was that there was nowhere else like it in Vienna. Mezzanin became the meeting point for the city’s art scene almost before she had time to understand what she had built. The gallery’s name has never changed, and it has never carried hers. “A gallery is a vessel for artists. It is not about the gallerist.”

Thirty years on, the vessel has moved. Geneva became Mezzanin’s headquarters in 2014, and the shift suited her. Vienna, she says, is an art metropolis, larger and more competitive in every way. The fight to find her own path there is exactly what prepared her for starting again somewhere new. Geneva gave her something different: collectors with real commitment, and an internationalism she had not found in Austria. “Now after ten years living here I don’t need to do international art fairs anymore as I have my collectors in town and around Geneva.” They come back not just to buy but for ideas, for conversation, for the relationship itself. Older collectors in particular stay close over time, building a trust that goes beyond any single work. That is what she is really building, edition by edition

It is a long game, and she knows the industry is not an easy one. But it does not seem to worry her. When she visits a young artist, she listens and looks at the same time. She asks about the starting point of an idea, the inspiration behind it, what drives it. Then she looks at the work itself deeply. “At the end I feel it what is good, and decide from my stomach.” After three decades, she trusts that instinct, though she is clear on that it took time to earn. “Only after 30 years I know now what I am talking about.” You do not need a celebrated name or an established reputation to catch her attention. What she is looking for is something less easy to define and more difficult to fake.

The word she reaches for is not taste but curiosity. Taste, she says, belongs to interior designers. What a gallerist needs is an obsessive interest in how people function, what moves them, what they make. “Curiosity is one of the most key elements of being a gallerist. You cannot learn it. You have it.” What she brings alongside that curiosity is pure unadulterated enthusiasm: standing in front of a work with a collector, sitting in a studio with an artist, and meaning every word.

On Instagram, on screens, on the accelerated rhythms of how art is now seen and shared, she is measured. “My experience is that in the end you need to go to the museum or gallery in person to take your time, to dive in and see what you like.” A painting can never truly be understood on a screen. “You only feel an aura of an artwork when you stand in front of it.”

When she needs to step away from all of it, she goes to the mountains. She describes them with the same precision and feeling she brings to art: the harmony of shapes and colours, the pureness above the treeline, the sense of something being reset. Back in Geneva, she points to the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, and the work Marc-Olivier Wahler is doing there as a place that deserves far more attention than it gets.

I asked her to finish a sentence: Great art should… “Touch your inside. This can be loud or very silent. It depends on the artwork.”

Walking back across the Plaine de Plainpalais, I thought about what it takes to do something for thirty years and still talk about it the way Karin does. Not with the weariness of someone who has seen it all, but with the curiosity of someone who still wants to know what comes next. You cannot learn that, as she would say. You either have it, or you don’t.